The rules of heritage and inheritance law in the Lower Egyptian Era and the Ptolemaic period (664-30 BC)
Michel CHAUVEAU - Director of Research at EPHE
Emmanuelle CHEVREAU - Professor (université Paris 2 Panthéon-Assas)
Sandra LIPPERT - Professor (université de Tübingen)
Christiane ZIVIE-COCHE - Director of Research at EPHE
Jean-Pierre CORIAT - Professor (université Paris 2 Panthéon-Assas)
Sophie DEMARE-LAFONT - Professor (université Paris 2 Panthéon-Assas)
The present work concerns a particular period of Pharaonic Egypt, marked by the appearance of a new cursive writing - the demotic writing - transcribing a more recent state of the Egyptian language, and a loss of political independence.
Among the available legal documentation, numerous texts concerned the rules of patrimonial law and their modes of transmission: theoretical texts (such as the Legal Code of Hermopolis), but also, and in larger numbers, the application documentation of these legal rules and the court orders relating to it, and literary texts which give us another view of the first millennium B.C. Egyptian family way of functioning.
Besides the description of the rules of the family intra family holdings transmission, the analysis of this documentation allows to determine what the role of the family main component was: father, first son, woman, and to understand the inheritance process as vector, not only of the family goods, but mostly of the family chief (or patriarch) role in the family undivided possession.
Then, the useful judicial sources show that the first millennium B.C. Egyptians interpreted the rules of patrimonial transmissions and used of them strategically in order to disregard the established principles, often since centuries.